Previews

Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity

Spiffy:

Iffy:

Gimmick-centric courses; might be too similar to previous game.

Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity returns us to the hoverboarding hijinks of Sonic and his gang, as well as their rivals the Babylon Rogues. Zero Gravity, from our exclusive time with the game in the Snowy Kingdom stage, felt very familiar based on experience with the original Sonic Riders. Everyone seems to have learned a bit from Shadow, gaining the dark hedgehog's abilities to manipulate time and space. Thankfully, no one has picked up his penchant for high-caliber weaponry.

Time to Gun It!

As in the first game, a wide variety of characters are available to play. Their strengths will differ, and each course will offer almost entirely different routes for different characters -- a grind-focused character might be able to take a rail route and zip above the competition, whereas a strength character might be able to bash his way through a blockade. This is no change from the first game, so it seems like Sega is happy with the way it chops up the play area of the tracks.

Kicking the unique abilities of each character up the proverbial notch will be the unlockable abilities of certain hoverboards. Each character will have a wide variety of boards they can unlock, and each board has three abilities that can be unlocked by picking up rings on the track. These might be as mundane as a higher top speed or gravity gauge, but they might also give your character the ability to grind or otherwise access new areas of the track.

The gravity gauge sits in the lower left-hand of the screen, filling as you do tricks and land jumps. Using it, you can essentially turn on a dime by slowing your speed in place to zero, rotating in place, and blasting ahead. When you fill it, you can also launch yourself ahead at warp speed, filtering the screen colorfully and letting you blast past opponents.

From our early time with Zero Gravity, it seem like Sega is playing it safe with the formula it started building with the original Sonic Riders. We're not expecting the final product to blow us away, but until a new Mario Kart, chasing Sonic and his groupies through bizarre settings and unlocking unique boards should be a suitable substitute for mascot racing fans.